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Government Health Care Costs: The Scary Truth

Although we have yet to receive a full cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office regarding ObamaCare, there are a lot of numbers floating around out there. Harry Reid says $848 Billion, The Cato Institute says 2.5 trillion.

There is no way to know at this point what health care is going to cost. We don’t know because we can only make an educated guess as to how many people will actually use this new entitlement. I think we can be confident in saying that it isn’t going to be cheap.

Since the Congressional Budget Office will be scoring ObamaCare, let’s take a quick look at their track record regarding health care related entitlements and see how accurate they’ve been.

Medicaid
The joint state-federal program for the poor.
First year estimate: $238 million
Actual first year cost: $1 billion
Cost for fiscal 2009: $251 billion. Up almost 25% this year alone!

Medicaid now costs THIRTY SEVEN times more than it did when it was launched (adjusted for inflation).